Shares of Amazon.com and Microsoft soared Friday as investors digested surprisingly vibrant profits and prospects from their cloud operations.
In fact, were it not for Amazon, up 14.1% to a record $ 445.10, and Microsoft, up 10.5% to $ 47.87, the major averages probably would have turned in losses for the day.
The Nasdaq-100 Index was up nearly 60 points to 4,537. Amazon and Microsoft contributed nearly 55 points of the gain by themselves. If you throw in Starbucks, up 2.4% or 1.6 points, Seattle-based stocks generated 56 points of the Nasdaq-100′s very pleasant performance.
The Dow Jones industrials were up 21 points on the day to 18,080. Microsoft contributed 30 points to the index's gain. The rest of the index was off 8 points.
Oh, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos made $ 4.6 billion in a day.
Jeff Bezos, chief executive officer of Amazon.com Inc. and founder of Blue Origin LLC, speaks at the Ignition: Future Of Digital conference in New York, U.S., on Tuesday, Dec. 2, 2014. Bezos said Amazon shares will remain volatile due to new businesses. Photographer: Peter Foley/Bloomberg via Getty Images
But there are a few other important points to be made here.
First, the cloud is far more important and valuable than maybe a lot of investors had thought. Amazon Web Services, Amazon's cloud business, generated more than $ 5 billion in revenue in the four quarters than ended on March 21. It looks headed to $ 6 billion in revenue in 2015. On a percentage basis, AWS is the most profitable segment in Amazon. And, as Brian Olsavsky said on the company's conference call, "From our perspective, it's a business that's still really in day one."
No comments:
Post a Comment